Display caption

The central rotund shape in this painting derives from a photograph of a Sudanese corn-bin, which Ernst has transformed into a sinister mechanical monster. Ernst often re-used found images, and either added or removed elements in order to create new realities, all the more disturbing for being drawn from the known world. The work’s title comes from a childish German rhyme that begins: ‘The elephant from Celebes has sticky, yellow bottom grease’. The painting’s inexplicable combinations, such as the headless female figure and the elephant-like creature, suggest images from a dream and the Freudian technique of free association.

'Celebes', or 'The Elephant Celebes' as it is sometimes known, was painted in Cologne in 1921 and was Max Ernst's first large picture. It was bought shortly after its completion by his friend the poet Paul Eluard and later passed from him to Sir Roland Penrose, who owned it until 1975 when he gave it to be sold for the benefit of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Sir Roland's Charlton Lecture, op. cit., is by far the most detailed study of it and is the basis of the following note. The reader is referred to it for a detailed compositional analysis and interpretation.

This painting grew directly out of Ernst's use of collage from 1919 onwards to produce bizarre combinations of images, though no preliminary collages or sketches were made for it. The idea of the painting appeared spontaneously on the canvas with few alterations as it progressed.

The boiler-like monster to which the title refers is, like the rest of the painting, highly ambiguous. It has a horned head with apparently sightless eyes, but a pair of tusks projecting on the left suggests the possible presence of a second head (or perhaps the real head?) on the other side. Its neck seems to consist of a long snake-like coil which emerges from a hole in its upper section; the top is surmounted by a brightly-coloured construction containing a mysterious eye. It seems to be standing in a large open space, but there are also indications that it is embedded in a solid background, while two fishes swim in the sky above. Three upright objects stand around it, while in the bottom corner a headless mannequin figure with a raised arm appears to be beckoning the monster towards it.

As was first noted by John Craxton and subsequently confirmed by Ernst himself, the image of the boiler-like form on its pair of 'legs' was originally inspired by an illustration in an English anthropological journal of a huge communal corn-bin peculiar to the Konkombwa tribe of the southern Sudan. The photograph is taken from the same angle and is basically very similar, but the artist has given the hollow clay container a metallic appearance and changed its character completely by adding the various appendages described above.

Ernst also revealed to Sir Roland that the title 'Celebes' was taken from some scurrilous couplets popular among German schoolboys which run as follows:

Der Elefant von CelebesHat hinten etwas gelebes

Der Elefant von SumatraDer vögelt seine Grossmama

Der Elefant von IndienDer kann das Loch nicht findien

(The elephant from Celebeshas sticky, yellow bottom grease

The elephant from Sumatraalways fucks his grandmamma

The elephant from Indiacan never find the hole ha-ha)

There are various light-hearted scribbles on the back of the canvas of caricature-like figures and animals, which mostly seem to have no connection with the painting on the other side. However Mrs Gabrielle Keiller has noted that they include two figures holding what appear to be golf clubs (confirmed by the word 'GOLF' written beside them) and being observed by a grotesque head with a balloon coming from its mouth containing the words 'HA HA' - possibly an allusion to the last verse of the rhyme.

Published in:Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, pp.204-6, reproduced p.204 and back of dust-jacket in colour